Insuring Santa

What insurance would Santa need, and how much would it cost?  We had a go at getting cover for St. Nick (his database of all households is a GDPR nightmare).

Santa has a lot on at this time of year.  So, we’ve taken a thing off his mind by getting him some sensible insurance for Christmas.

First stop: Travel Insurance.  Onto the internet.  Single Trip.  Mini-disaster: CompareTheMarket makes you select all the countries you need cover in.  A visit to Google confirms that 160 countries celebrate Christmas.  Damn.  10 minutes later.  Next issue: baggage cover maxes out at £4,000.  Let’s skip that – we’ve got bigger problems than £4k will solve if Blitzen throws a shoe over the North Sea.  A little creativity around date of birth and…we’re off…55 companies quoting for the chance…amazing! 9 companies quoted and the cheapest premium is £24.31.  Thank you InsureAndGo…

Next on the list: Professional Indemnity.  I had concerns about business address, but it turns out that our glorious Post Office has thought of everything.  This is – no joke – Santa’s address in case you need it: Santa’s Grotto, Reindeerland, XM4 5HQ.  Next thinker: does Santa need Employers Liability cover? Does he pay the elves? Does he have a modern slavery statement? Let’s hedge the bet and get him some just in case.  Then the declarations: Have you ever been bankrupt? There will have been years when the kids were especially good that must’ve brought Santa close to the line, but he’s still in business so I’m going with: No.  Get Quote…drum roll…2 providers in the mix and the winner is AXA at £276.15.  Bargain.

Finally: Commercial Vehicle insurance for the sleigh and reindeer.  It’s a tough one because pets invalidate most motor vehicle policies.  This’ll need something specialist.  Fortunately, KBIS offers an online quote facility for horse and carriage (close enough) and lists possible activities including “Long Distance/endurance (over 40km)” which seemed to cover it.  All for the premium price of £469.86.

Total to cover the old round red fella: £770.32

Conclusion: it takes a long time to get insurance for Santa, and it’s not worth it.

Company Values

We’ve all come across ‘Company Values’ at some point or other, and if you’re like me you probably thought they were bland nonsense dreamed up by HR to make the company seem fluffy to the outside world.

I went to a talk a few weeks back by a company founder who reckoned that establishing an ‘internal brand’ was the most important and difficult thing to get right. So I figured we’d give it a go at our next Innovation Day

Fortunately, at Ignite we’re of a size where we can get everyone in our Manchester office round a (very big) table, so everyone was involved in this process, which was great. We focused on our colleagues, discussing qualities in each other that we admired. We wrote these on post-it notes and put them up on the wall. To divide these dozens of notes into a few categories we came up with real-world examples of when the qualities were evident – someone introducing a new technology that saved everyone time; some who chose a halal restaurant for Friday team lunch to make sure everyone could have chicken; someone who worked late to ensure they weren’t a blocker to a project.

The post-its grouped around each other, and we chose a word that encapsulated that group of qualities. These are our company values. They’re meaningful to us, and we’re trying to refer to them in the way we interact with each other, our clients and our system.

Ignite Values

• Inclusiveness – We work best as a team in a friendly, flexible, inclusive environment. We’re honest and professional, we go out of our way to create a happy environment, and we never let people down.
• Passion – We work hard and take pride in the work we do. We proactively take ownership of new ideas, projects and things that need doing.
• Expertise – We are a team of specialists with deep commercial and technical expertise. We know our clients’ businesses and leverage our technical skills to use that knowledge to help them.
• Innovation – We are always looking to improve, both ourselves and the products we build. We are responsive, creative, and always strive towards higher quality.

Because everyone got involved, all our team can look at that list and associate some part of each value with themselves, their team-mates and their day to day work.

For those of you out there running teams/companies I highly recommend this value-identification exercise (takes about an hour). It’s a positive, creative and energising process and result.